Juxtaposing BTE and ATE – on the role of the European insurance industry in funding civil litigation

One of the ways in which legal services are financed, and indeed shaped, is through private insurance arrangement. Two contrasting types of legal expenses insurance contracts (LEI) seem to dominate in Europe: before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE) legal expenses insurance. Notwithstanding institutional differences between different legal systems, BTE and ATE insurance arrangements may be instrumental if government policy is geared towards strengthening a market-oriented system of financing access to justice for individuals and business. At the same time, emphasizing the role of a private industry as a keeper of the gates to justice raises issues of accountability and transparency, not readily reconcilable with demands of competition. Moreover, multiple actors (clients, lawyers, courts, insurers) are involved, causing behavioural dynamics which are not easily predicted or influenced. Against this background, this paper looks into BTE and ATE arrangements by analysing the particularities of BTE and ATE arrangements currently available in some European jurisdictions and by painting a picture of their respective markets and legal contexts. This allows for some reflection on the performance of BTE and ATE providers as both financiers and keepers. Two issues emerge from the analysis that are worthy of some further reflection. Firstly, there is the problematic long-term sustainability of some ATE products. Secondly, the challenges faced by policymakers that would like to nudge consumers into voluntarily taking out BTE LEI

Penilaian Kinerja Keuangan Koperasi di Kabupaten Pelalawan

This paper describe development and financial performance of cooperative in District Pelalawan among 2007 - 2008. Studies on primary and secondary cooperative in 12 sub-districts. Method in this stady use performance measuring of productivity, efficiency, growth, liquidity, and solvability of cooperative. Productivity of cooperative in Pelalawan was highly but efficiency still low. Profit and income were highly, even liquidity of cooperative very high, and solvability was good

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass

Severe early onset preeclampsia: short and long term clinical, psychosocial and biochemical aspects

Preeclampsia is a pregnancy specific disorder commonly defined as de novo hypertension and proteinuria after 20 weeks gestational age. It occurs in approximately 3-5% of pregnancies and it is still a major cause of both foetal and maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide1. As extensive research has not yet elucidated the aetiology of preeclampsia, there are no rational preventive or therapeutic interventions available. The only rational treatment is delivery, which benefits the mother but is not in the interest of the foetus, if remote from term. Early onset preeclampsia (<32 weeks’ gestational age) occurs in less than 1% of pregnancies. It is, however often associated with maternal morbidity as the risk of progression to severe maternal disease is inversely related with gestational age at onset2. Resulting prematurity is therefore the main cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity in patients with severe preeclampsia3. Although the discussion is ongoing, perinatal survival is suggested to be increased in patients with preterm preeclampsia by expectant, non-interventional management. This temporising treatment option to lengthen pregnancy includes the use of antihypertensive medication to control hypertension, magnesium sulphate to prevent eclampsia and corticosteroids to enhance foetal lung maturity4. With optimal maternal haemodynamic status and reassuring foetal condition this results on average in an extension of 2 weeks. Prolongation of these pregnancies is a great challenge for clinicians to balance between potential maternal risks on one the eve hand and possible foetal benefits on the other. Clinical controversies regarding prolongation of preterm preeclamptic pregnancies still exist – also taking into account that preeclampsia is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the Netherlands5 - a debate which is even more pronounced in very preterm pregnancies with questionable foetal viability6-9. Do maternal risks of prolongation of these very early pregnancies outweigh the chances of neonatal survival? Counselling of women with very early onset preeclampsia not only comprises of knowledge of the outcome of those particular pregnancies, but also knowledge of outcomes of future pregnancies of these women is of major clinical importance. This thesis opens with a review of the literature on identifiable risk factors of preeclampsia

Measurement of t(t)over-bar normalised multi-differential cross sections in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV, and simultaneous determination of the strong coupling strength, top quark pole mass, and parton distribution functions

Peer reviewe

Search for anomalous production of events with three or more leptons in pp collisions at √s = 8TeV

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published articles title, journal citation, and DOI.A search for physics beyond the standard model in events with at least three leptons is presented. The data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5fb-1 of proton-proton collisions with center-of-mass energy s=8TeV, was collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC during 2012. The data are divided into exclusive categories based on the number of leptons and their flavor, the presence or absence of an opposite-sign, same-flavor lepton pair (OSSF), the invariant mass of the OSSF pair, the presence or absence of a tagged bottom-quark jet, the number of identified hadronically decaying τ leptons, and the magnitude of the missing transverse energy and of the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta. The numbers of observed events are found to be consistent with the expected numbers from standard model processes, and limits are placed on new-physics scenarios that yield multilepton final states. In particular, scenarios that predict Higgs boson production in the context of supersymmetric decay chains are examined. We also place a 95% confidence level upper limit of 1.3% on the branching fraction for the decay of a top quark to a charm quark and a Higgs boson (t→cH), which translates to a bound on the left- and right-handed top-charm flavor-violating Higgs Yukawa couplings, λtcH and λctH, respectively, of |λtcH|2+|λctH|2<0.21

Measurement of associated W plus charm production in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for an L-mu - L-tau gauge boson using Z -> 4 mu events in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search for a narrow Z' gauge boson with a mass between 5 and 70 GeV resulting from an L-mu - L-tau U (1) local gauge symmetry is reported. Theories that predict such a particle have been proposed as an explanation of various experimental discrepancies, including the lack of a dark matter signal in direct-detection experiments, tension in the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and reports of possible lepton flavor universality violation in B meson decays. A data sample of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 77.3 fb(-1) recorded in 2016 and 2017 by the CMS detector at the LHC. Events containing four muons with an invariant mass near the standard model Z boson mass are analyzed, and the selection is further optimized to be sensitive to the events that may contain Z -> Z'mu mu -> 4 mu decays. The event yields are consistent with the standard model predictions. Upper limits of 10(-8)-10(-7) at 95% confidence level are set on the product of branching fractions B(Z -> Z'mu mu)B(Z' -> mu mu), depending on the Z' mass, which excludes a Z' boson coupling strength to muons above 0.004-0.3. These are the first dedicated limits on L-mu - L-tau models at the LHC and result in a significant increase in the excluded model parameter space. The results of this search may also be used to constrain the coupling strength of any light Z' gauge boson to muons. (C) 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe

Azimuthal separation in nearly back-to-back jet topologies in inclusive 2-and 3-jet events in pp collisions at root s=13TeV

A measurement for inclusive 2- and 3-jet events of the azimuthal correlation between the two jets with the largest transverse momenta, Delta phi(12), is presented. The measurement considers events where the two leading jets are nearly collinear ("back-to-back") in the transverse plane and is performed for several ranges of the leading jet transverse momentum. Proton-proton collision data collected with the CMS experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1) are used. Predictions based on calculations using matrix elements at leading-order and next-to-leading-order accuracy in perturbative quantum chromodynamics supplemented with leading-log parton showers and hadronization are generally in agreement with themeasurements. Discrepancies between the measurement and theoretical predictions are as large as 15%, mainly in the region 177 degrees <Delta phi(12) <180 degrees. The 2- and 3-jet measurements are not simultaneously described by any of models.Peer reviewe

Measurement of the t(t)over-bar production cross section, the top quark mass, and the strong coupling constant using dilepton events in pp collisions at root s=13TeV

A measurement of the top quark-antiquark pair production cross section sigma(t (t) over bar) in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is presented. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1), recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC in 2016. Dilepton events (e(+/-) mu(-/+), mu(+) mu(-), e(+) e(-)) are selected and the cross section is measured from a likelihood fit. For a top quark mass parameter in the simulation of m(t)(MC) = 172.5 GeV the fit yields a measured cross section sigma(t (t) over bar) = 803 +/- 2 (stat) +/- 25 (syst) +/- 20 (lumi) pb, in agreement with the expectation from the standard model calculation at next-to-next-to-leading order. A simultaneous fit of the cross section and the top quark mass parameter in the POWHEG simulation is performed. The measured value of m(t)(MC) = 172.33 +/- 0.14 (stat)(-0.72)(+0.66) (syst) GeV is in good agreement with previous measurements. The resulting cross section is used, together with the theoretical prediction, to determine the top quark mass and to extract a value of the strong coupling constant with different sets of parton distribution functions.Peer reviewe